From a Use Case Categorization Scheme Towards a Maturity Model for Engineering Distributed Ledgers

This contribution focuses on the maturity of the engineering of business applications for a trusted collaboration in business networks. Distributed ledgers emerge as technology enabler for establishing trust across business partners while blockchain is often used as a synonym. Hence, mature knowledge for application engineering and quality assured methods for selecting technology platforms for distributed collaboration are essential. When choosing a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) it is difficult to compare the different technologies in order to identify the one technology best suitable for a specific use case. Platforms’ maturity for distributed ledgers cannot be assessed sufficiently. Detailed knowledge about the technological details of platforms and functional characteristics are sometimes sparse. To start with, we propose a characterization approach for distributed ledgers based on various classification schemas. This characterization is founded in an evaluation of use cases and prototypical implementations as well as a record of projects conducted. The approach allows one to sort out unsuitable technologies at an early stage. Since the automation of business cooperation is one of the core benefits of DLT, Smart Contracts for the automation of business processes and Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAO) for the specification of collaboration networks furnish a key benefit for business re-engineering with DLT. Levels of maturity for collaboration specification are defined to distinguish different computational and organizational powers in contract enforcements.